The Men Stood Like Iron: How the Iron Brigade Won Its Name

By Lance J. Herdegen

Book Overview

No volunteers tramped with more innocent resolve on the drill fields of 1861 than the farmers, immigrants, shopkeepers, and ?piney? camp boys who volunteered for the Second, Sixth, and Seventh Wisconsin and the Nineteenth Indiana Infantry.The Men Stood Like Iron is the moving, often melancholy, story of how the backwoods ?Calico boys? became soldiers of an ?Iron Brigade,? a unit so celebrated that General George McClellan called it ?equal to the best troops in any army in the world.?The brigade was created when four regiments reached Washington following the Union defeat at Bull Run. It won immediate attention for being the only all-Western brigade of the Eastern armies and for th tall black hats issued to the soldiers. It was a year before the brigade saw any action. When the fighting did come it was almost more than the volunteers could handle. In four battles over three weeks?Brawner?s Farm, Second Bull Run, South Mountain, and Antietam?the regiments became famous at terrible cost. By Appomattox Court House, the Iron Brigade had endured a proportionally higher number of battle deaths than any other Federal unit.It is a story of young America caught up in a civil war of unexpected magnitude and those uncertain weeks in 1862 when the fate of the Republic rested on citizen volunteers in a make-shift army. It is also the story of George McClellan, the beginnings of American military traditions and of the young men who gave ?Little Mac? their devotion and trust.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0253332214
• ISBN13: 9780253332219
• Release Date: March 1997
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.6"