The galvanized…
The Legal Genealogist had a ball yesterday talking about a wide variety of records that exist today because of an unusual set of laws.
In Lincoln’s Laws and the Records of War, a webinar for Legacy Family Tree Webinars that you can now see free online through April 25, we looked at a whole bunch of things that we might not have — or not in the form we have them — if it hadn’t been for the formalization of the laws of war during the Civil War.
Among the neat records we looked at were those involving deserters and spies, the huge volume of records of courts martial, and the records of interactions between the military and civilians.
But — as is always the case in any time-limited presentation — we didn’t look at everything.
One record set came up only afterwards, in a question from my friend and colleague Jill Morelli, about the records of “Union soldiers who were in a Confederate prison and who were successfully recruited by the Confederates in order to get out of prison.”
Now this is a neat question, because the people we’re talking about here — and these folks were on both sides — are the galvanized. Galvanized Yankees were those Confederates who renounced their allegiance to the Confederacy as part of the price of release from capture. It was “an insulting term Confederates applied to individuals who took the oath of allegiance to cover themselves with Union blue.”1 And, it appears, “The term ‘galvanized’ has also been applied to former Union soldiers enlisting in the Confederate Army.”2
There’s a fair amount that’s been written about galvanized Yankees — those ex-Confederates who served in the Union forces — but not nearly as much as about the folks Jill is interested in: Union troops who became Confederates. So, she wondered, what records might there be? Would their names be recorded, for example, in the registers of deserters that are part of Record Group 110 at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. that we talked about in the webinar?3
That record group is one possibility for sure and should always be checked. But there’s another source that needs to be checked as well.
From records collected in Record Group 249, the Records of the Commissary General of Prisoners, there’s a single roll of microfilm produced by the National Archives as Microfilm Publication M2156, Lists of Federal Prisoners of War Who Enlisted in the Confederate Army. According to the Descriptive Pamhlet for this item:
The records include several rolls (lists) created during and after the Civil War that name former Union soldiers in rough alphabetical order. Most lists identify each man’s rank, former Union regiment, date and place where captured, date of release, and remarks. There is also memoranda and correspondence created or copied within the Adjutant General’s Office (AGO) from 1882 to 1905, some of which discusses copying information in these records for inclusion in the Union and Confederate Compiled Military Service Records (CMSRs) created by the AGO. In addition, there are several oaths of allegiance to the Confederate Government, 1862-3. ….4
The records may not be not a complete list — as the Descriptive Pamphlet makes clear, there were ultimately three units comprised mostly of foreign nationals who’d been drafted to serve in the Union Army and one that also included native-born Americans, and not all of their records survived, and there may have been individual cases outside of those units.
And no, this microfilm hasn’t been digitized, at least not yet. The NARA website says the only copy is available for review at Archives I, the main Archives building in downtown Washington D.C.
So it’s not perfect, but then what is, in genealogy? And it’s a great place to start if you’re looking for Union soldiers who ended up as Confederates.
Check out the webinar for more ideas about researching records of deserters, spies, courts martial and civilians during wartime. And while this one’s free for now, note again, for the record — truth in “advertising” here — as a Legacy presenter, I do benefit financially if you buy one of my recordings or the whole webinar series.
SOURCES
- Michèle T. Butts, “Trading Gray for Blue: Ex-Confederates Hold the Upper Missouri for the Union,” Prologue (Winter 2005), National Archives, Archives.gov (https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/ : accessed 19 Apr 2018). ↩
- Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.com), “Galvanized Yankees,” rev. 23 Feb 2018, citing U.S. National Park Service, “The Galvanized Yankees,” The Museum Gazette, Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, PDF now available via Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/web/ : accessed 19 Apr 2018) (“During the Civil War, in both Northern and Southern prison camps, soldiers sometimes decided to ‘galvanize,’ or change sides, to save themselves from the horrors of prison life”). ↩
- See “Records of the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau (Civil War),” Record Group 110, in Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States, HTML version, Archives.gov (https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/ : accessed 19 Apr 2018). ↩
- National Archives and Records Administration, Descriptive Pamphlet, M2156, Lists of Federal Prisoners of War Who Enlisted in the Confederate Army, 1862-1865, PDF (Washington DC: NARA, 2012). ↩
This time period is so fascinating! My Galvanized Yankee ancestor was courtmartialed for desertion only to have the court martial revoked by a special order I never found. Thanks to the good people at Fort Delaware, I learned about his actual court martial file. It has an opinion by the then-Judge Advocate General of the Union Army to the Secretary of War, who agreed, that the prison commandant didn’t have legal authority to convene a court martial, nullifying the decision that had been reached in my ancestor’s case. Wonderful new info about someone I thought was all figured out.
Great story, Anne. Hope you’re writing this up.
I have a German ancestor who was living in New Orleans when the Confederates took the city. His naturalization record claims he served for the Union, but the regiment and division listed on the naturalization record was a Confederate unit, not Union. Still looking for definitive records about what actually took place.
Have you found him in the actual service records of the time? Either Union or Confederate?
1st and 2nd Louisiana Regiment New Orleans Infantry were galvanized Yankees. Many were Confederate deserters from Mississippi and Louisiana who joined the Union army to garrison New Orleans.
1st-6th U.S. Volunteer Infantry were Confederate POWs in the Union army. I found a Creek Indian from Alabama who went from the Confederate army to POW to Union soldier in one of these units in Kansas and Colorado. If you see a Union soldier born in a Southern state but enlisting in a place like Camp Douglas, Illinois this is what is going on.
My galvanized Yankee served in the Alabama Infantry until he was captured north of Atlanta by Sherman’s troops. He wound up on the USS Susquehanna for the remainder of the war. He received a Union pension.
Herman Sonnen’s CSR says he served from 22 July 1863 until 10 Aug 1863 in Co. F, 5th LA Infantry. There’s an H. Sonnen listed in Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Louisiana , Affiliate Publication Number: M320 listed as serving in the Third Regiment, Second Brigade, First Division, Militia AND Third Regiment, Third Brigade, First Division, Militia.
Job #1: making sure you’re dealing with the same guy and not just the same name.
In addition to M2156, NARA has a “Reference Report” that gives guidance on researching “Galvanized Yankees.” It is “Military Service in the U.S. Volunteer Infantry, “Galvanized Yankees,” 1864–1866” available at
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/military/civil-war/galvanized-yankees.pdf and it includes a lot of the “usual” sources researchers should use for researching a person’s military service during that time period.
And if there’s anybody who should know… (Readers: meet the author of the Descriptive Pamphlet for M2156, and a NARA archivist extraordinaire!) Thanks, Claire!