Review - "From Gray to Blue: Galvanized Yankees in the American Civil War" by Patrick Garrow

[From Gray to Blue: Galvanized Yankees in the American Civil War by Patrick H. Garrow (University of Tennessee Press, 2025). Hardcover, map, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xvi,221/292. ISBN:978-1-62190-963-7. $75]

A companion volume to his 2020 book Changing Sides: Union Prisoners of War Who Joined the Confederate Army, Patrick Garrow's From Gray to Blue: Galvanized Yankees in the American Civil War strives to both redefine and expand our understanding of the "Galvanized Yankee" phenomenon of altered wartime allegiances. In his Centennial-era study The Galvanized Yankees (1963), author Dee Brown narrowly defined the term as encompassing those captured Confederate soldiers who were recruited into the U.S. Army straight from northern prisoner of war camps. An escape from the deadly health dangers and overall harsh living conditions of the camps was offered to these men in exchange for a defined period of army enlistment that was typically, but not always, served in the frontier West (where the chances of encountering former comrades in battle were minimal). Subsequent scholars and popular history writers alike have accepted and adopted that characterization ever since. However, Garrow sees that longstanding definition as being too restrictive in nature. In this volume, a Galvanized Yankee is any soldier "who first served in the Confederate army and then changed sides and joined the Union army" (pg. x). So added to the POW cohort are those who completed their Confederate term of service and subsequently enlisted in the Union Army as well as those who deserted Confederate service and later wore the blue uniform. In addition to bringing more motivational factors into play, the scale of numbers involved also increases from the thousands into perhaps tens of thousands through Garrow's examination.

Previous research, including Garrow's own, has made it clear that the overwhelming preponderance of Union soldiers who switched sides did so out of sheer desperation born of the miserable living conditions inside overcrowded and under-resourced Confederate POW camps. With northern facilities exhibiting many of the same problems, Confederate prisoners often shared similar motivations. However, Garrow's more expansive definitional approach and his broader research into Union and Confederate service records, regimental histories, pension records, and newspapers move additional motivational factors to the fore. One is money. Without further access to Confederate army pay, which was consistently in arrears and constantly devalued anyway, mid to late-war prisoners, especially those with increasingly destitute families of their own to support, were attracted by the financial prospects of stable pay in U.S. dollars and even enlistment bonuses. Latent unionism (or simply anti-Confederate feelings) among conscripted Confederate soldiers also led many of those individuals to switch sides when the opportunity arose. According to Garrow, perhaps the most significant yet least appreciated factor was the growing sense among many that the Confederate government had broken faith with its volunteer soldiers, in terms of both the direction of the war and promised support for them and their families, and was no longer deserving of loyalty and sacrifice.

After providing brief summaries of the living conditions within the camps that many of these individuals came from and the respective role each camp assumed in the recruitment of Galvanized Yankee units, the book profiles a selection of units that, in part or in whole, were composed of galvanized (or, as others put it, "whitewashed") recruits. These are the Twenty-Third and Sixty-Fifth Illinois, Ahl's Battery (aka First Delaware Heavy Artillery), First Connecticut Cavalry, Third Maryland Cavalry, First Florida Cavalry, Second North Carolina Infantry, Eleventh Ohio Cavalry, and, most significantly, the First through Sixth United States Volunteer Infantry. As one comes to realize, this group of unit selections—consisting of company and battalion-sized augmentations to existing northern regiments, new regiments raised locally within Confederate states (the assumption being that sizable numbers of Confederate deserters or those with expired enlistments joined them), and full regiments of former prisoners destined for the western frontier—together paint a strong representative picture of the types of Galvanized Yankee units that existed, their range of duties, and their areas of service. For each, Garrow explores recruitment and organization (with emphasis, of course, on the galvanized elements), outlines a basic demographic profile (state of birth, prewar occupation, etc.) of the recruits, and traces a fairly detailed account of the unit's military service. Also rather heavily emphasized in the unit histories are selections of medical case histories. That information is more anecdotally descriptive than thematic in nature but, to an extent, does speak to the lingering effects of the unhealthy conditions at the camps. Some indication of local civilian reaction to the presence of Galvanized Yankees in their midst is also of interest. For example, given the events of the previous ten years, the intensely negative reaction of Kansas newspapers to having their streets policed for a time by ex-Confederates of the Third USVI is easy to fathom.

There are some research limitations that hindered the author's efforts to dig deeper into the subject and provide the kinds of engaging and informative firsthand accounts that color the more standard Civil War unit histories. Understandably, some otherwise good resources for obtaining Civil War soldier information (such as newspaper obituaries) were reluctant to mention galvanized service. According to Garrow, prisoner accounts from Galvanized Yankees are exceedingly rare, and only a single dairy from one of those individuals (John C. Riggs of the Fifth USVI) is known to exist.

As mentioned above, Dee Brown's The Galvanized Yankees is a classic of the Civil War literature, but it is dated at this point, and Garrow offers some revisionist engagement with Brown in addition to his own study's expanded definition and analysis. As an example, Brown's study claimed that only one officer attached to the six USVI regiments (Capt. John Shanks, Co. I/Sixth USVI) had previously served in the Confederate Army, and it spends an entire chapter on that person's story, but Garrow's research identified more examples from the First, Fourth, and Sixth regiments.

In the end, the question arises as to whether organized units composed of Galvanized Yankees were worth the U.S. government's effort and expense. The record was mixed. Often, the soldiers were not trusted by officers, either those within the unit or those leading regiments that served alongside them in the field. Many of the units profiled in the book suffered from outrageous levels of desertion (as much as 50+%), the combination of that and disease dwarfing actual combat losses far more than was the case with the typical Civil War regiment of either side. What was behind that could be traced to a number of things, one being the three-year enlistment terms of some units organized very late in the war. With leading galvanized units not being necessarily an attractive prospect, officer quality could also be mediocre. Indeed, many of the galvanized units were not seen as reliable enough for front line combat and were relegated to rear area duties. Others did come to be relied upon to carry out important tasks. For example, the Second North Carolina suffered significant losses fighting in the eastern part of the state, and Garrow credits the First Florida Cavalry for becoming a principal stabilizing force in the often chaotic borderland between Florida and Alabama. Ahl's battery, which had a desertion rate far below other galvanized units and lost few men to disease or disability, is rated as the most successful unit in the study, but the gunners also had a comparatively cushy position as Fort Delaware camp guards during the entirety of their 1863-65 term of service. At the end of each unit treatment, Garrow rates the unit as being either successful or unsuccessful. Though a concrete set of criteria for differentiating between successful and unsuccessful galvanized units is not developed, it does seem to be the case that those units operating on the messier fringes of the conflict, where conventional manpower was at its most scarce, are often judged to have been the most successful. Shorter enlistment terms helped, too, particularly with desertion rates. Indeed, it is Garrow's studied opinion that the roles of the USVI soldiers as western frontier security troops and wagon train escorts filled a critical need for the United States at a fraught period of transition.

The postwar lives of a few individuals are profiled in an epilogue to offer readers a sense of the variety of social receptions they experienced upon returning home, but, as Garrow explains, broader analysis is beyond the scope of his study. Undoubtedly, many Galvanized Yankees were ostracized by their home communities and others were accepted depending on circumstances. The author's suggestion that the mass desertion that occurred within the late-war Confederate Army may have, at least to some extent, softened the home population's overall judgment of these men is an interesting point worthy of consideration.

Patrick Garrow's From Gray to Blue significantly widens and deepens our understanding of those Confederate soldiers who decided to switch sides during the Civil War and fight for the Union. While the contributions of Galvanized Yankee units to Union victory were relatively limited in scope, a strong case is made that they nevertheless assumed important military roles at a number of different times and on a variety of fronts.