Booknotes: Late to the Fight

New Arrival:

• Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg by Alexandre F. Caillot (LSU Press, 2025).

From the description: In Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg, historian Alexandre Caillot "explores the combat performance of the Union soldiers who filled newly raised regiments that fought through the Civil War’s final year. Historians have typically regarded these late enlistees as substandard to those who signed on at the war’s start. Using the experiences of the 17th Vermont and 31st Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiments to assess the record of late-arriving soldiers under fire, Caillot shows that these forgotten boys in blue left behind a record of valor and sacrifice essential to achieving the destruction of the Confederacy."

Focusing on late-war volunteer units that fought in the eastern theater, this looks like a strong companion work to pair with Edwin Rutan's excellent High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor (2024). In addition to the more specific insights offered through concentrating one's efforts on only two regiments, it'll be interesting to compare how Caillot defines and assesses combat performance/effectiveness with how Rutan did so in his broader examination.

So why the 17th Vermont and 31st Maine? According to the introduction, they were selected because both regiments were conventional infantry, their ranks were filled with new enlistees, no conscripts served in either, and they shared the same heavy combat record. With both assigned to the Second Brigade of the Ninth Corps's Second Division, they fought in the same eight battles that were part of the 1864-65 Overland and Richmond-Petersburg campaigns. Thus, the author feels that the two regiments were "ideal choices for a comparative study of combat performance because of their similar experiences" (pg. 5).