Union Army
Union Army.Although the United States had a regular army of 16,000 career soldiers when the Civil War began, throughout the conflict it placed chief reliance on an ad hoc force of U.S. Volunteers, the Union army. On 15 April 1861, President Abraham Lincoln summoned 75,000 militia to serve for three months. (Oversubscribed, 91,816 were actually accepted.) Then, without legal authority, he increased the regular army by 22,714 men and called for 42,034 three‐year volunteers. In July 1861, the U.S. Congress sanctioned Lincoln's extralegal acts and authorized 500,000 additional volunteers.
The Union army grew steadily throughout the war, from 186,751 in July 1861 to 1,000,516 in May 1865. By war's end, about 2 million men had served in the army, a figure that includes 179,000 African Americans and 100,000 white unionist Southerners from the Confederate states. However, at any given time as many as one‐third of Union...
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