47th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment

rdf:langString 47th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment

rdf:langString 47th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry

rdf:langString Infantry

rdf:langString State Flag of Pennsylvania, circa 1863.

rdf:langString Brevet Brigadier General John Peter Shindel Gobin

rdf:langString Colonel Tilghman H. Good

rdf:langString Lieutenant Colonel George Warren Alexander

rdf:langString Founder

rdf:langString Second in Command

rdf:langString Final Commander

rdf:langString United States

rdf:langString August 1861 – January 1866

rdf:langString Also known as 47th Pennsylvania Infantry or 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers

rdf:langString The 47th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry was an infantry regiment that served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Formed by adults and teenagers from small towns and larger metropolitan areas of Pennsylvania, this regiment was composed primarily of men of German heritage, and was ultimately known as the 47th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers due to the length of service by the majority of men on its rosters. Many of their family and friends still spoke German or its Pennsylvania Dutch variant in their homes and churches more than a hundred years after their forebears emigrated from Germany in search of religious or political freedom. Other members of this regiment traced their roots to Ireland; at least two had emigrated from Cuba; several were formerly enslaved men who had escaped or been liberated from plantations or other Confederate-held areas of the Deep South. Roughly 70 percent of those who served with the 47th Pennsylvania Infantry were residents of the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, Catasauqua, and Easton and surrounding communities in Lehigh and Northampton counties in what today comprises the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania. Company C (also known as the "Sunbury Guards") was formed primarily with men from Northumberland County. Companies D and H were staffed by men from Perry County. Recruited at community gathering places in their respective home towns, most of the men who served with the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers enrolled for military service at county seats or other large population centers. The oldest member of the regiment, 65-year-old Benjamin Walls, was an affluent farmer who would attempt to reenlist three years later at the age of 68 after being seriously wounded while preventing his regiment's American flag from falling into enemy hands during the Battle of Pleasant Hill. The youngest was John Boulton Young, a 13-year-old drummer boy from Sunbury, Pennsylvania in Northumberland County. Dubbed "Boltie" (or "Boulty") and described in letters home by regimental officers as the regiment's "pet," he became the 47th Pennsylvania's first casualty, succumbing to smallpox at the Kalorama eruptive fever hospital in Georgetown on October 17, 1861. According to Sunbury's Daily Item, the uniform that Young had worn during his brief service was a dark blue wool Zouave-style jacket with red trim and red wool pants [with] leather gaiters to protect his legs while marching," a style dramatically different from the more traditional Union blues worn by other members of the regiment. Due to his small stature, Young was also given "an undersized, nonregulation drum complete with small drumsticks," which measured just "13 1/2 inches across and...13 inches deep." A significant percentage of the men who served with the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers did so after first completing their three months' service with other regiments from Pennsylvania in response to President Abraham Lincoln's call for volunteers to help defend the nation's capital following Fort Sumter's fall to Confederate forces in mid-April 1861. Reenlisting in home towns following their respective honorable discharges from this service, they mustered in as part of the newly formed 47th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry in at Camp Curtin in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania during August and September 1861.